IT’S significant that yesterday’s Israeli national election – the most important in generations – produced the lowest voter turnout in the Jewish state’s history.

It seems voters sensed in advance how depressing the results would be.

Public-opinion polls also suggested that as many as one in five Israelis went to the polls undecided on whom to vote for – an astonishing display of indecision by an electorate noted for its fierce and unyielding partisanship.

Israel confronts a Hamas-led government on its doorstep. Yet the results, based on exit polls, show a nation adrift in doubt and indecision – fed up with the political status quo and desperately searching for a new, strong leader when none seems to exist.

The traditional Big Two of Israeli politics, Labor and Likud, fared poorly. Between them, they used to win 70-plus seats in the 120-member Knesset. Last night, Labor looked to wind up with about 20 seats; Likud, headed by Bibi Netanyahu, only 11.

Voters instead looked to new faces and parties: The non-ideological Pensioners Party, headed by former Mossad spymaster Rafi Eitan, had never before qualified for a seat in the Knesset; last night, it won about seven seats.

Kadima, the new party founded by Ariel Sharon and led by his successor, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, came in first and will form the next government. But its 30 or so seats are a disappointment: Polls just 10 days ago showed it approaching 40.

And even that was a far cry from the 50-plus seats that Sharon was on track to win when he was struck down by a massive stroke on Jan. 4. A healthy Sharon might have become the first candidate in Israel’s history to win an outright majority.

Sharon had bolted from Likud to form Kadima in an effort to formalize the national consensus he’d created in office. In the process, he hoped to reshape Israel’s political landscape just as he was unilaterally redrawing the nation’s borders.

But Olmert is not Sharon, and Kadima has become an omnibus gathering of political outcasts under a much weaker leader who – while trying to sound like he’s following in his predecessor’s footsteps – does not enjoy the level of public trust needed to achieve his goals.

(Besides which, as The Post’s Uri Dan, a longtime Sharon confidant, has written, Olmert has veered sharply from Sharon’s carefully crafted strategic disengagement policy. His campaign calls for a major redeployment from the West Bank, for example, seemed designed more a ploy to win votes than a long-term plan to implement secure permanent borders.)

The early results suggest that Olmert will have to form the same kind of patchwork governing coalition that Israel has seen for decades, inviting Labor and at least one of the Orthodox religious parties to join Kadima. That means more of the same old closed-door bargaining and haggling over money and power.

But Israelis are tired of such tawdry goings-on. Escaping them was the hope of Kadima when Sharon formed it – that he could dominate the landscape, leaving smaller parties no choice but to endorse his policies.

Instead, everything seems up for grabs once again.

Olmert will try to push through his version of unilateral disengagement, but he may not even be able to outmaneuver the long knives of rival would-be leaders in his own party.

Three months ago, Israelis had the very real possibility of a positive political upheaval. Those hopes vanished when Ariel Sharon slipped into the coma from which he may never awaken.

So Israel has voted without Sharon – and though the faces are new, the overall picture is far too familiar.